All in all — and especially by the low standards of LeMons — the race was a big success. The Bernal Dads began the weekend with an unannounced micro-parade down Cortland:

From there it was a glorious cruise across the Golden Gate Bridge…

… before arriving at Sears Point to set up camp. Once base camp was established, the two battered Bernal Dads cars — The Molvo and The Whale — were wheeled in for tech inspection, which they passed with flying colors.

During the races on Saturday and Sunday, the cars performed more or less flawlessly. With 160 cars competing, chaos often reigned on the track. But the Bernal Dads soldiered on, suffering only a broken fan belt and an unfortunate incident during which Sharpie-wielding vandals marred the logo of a certain celebrity-obsessed blog about Bernal Heights:

Very funny, fellas. Veeeeeery funny.

Luckily, a visiting member of Bernal Dads fan club, Bernalwood’s own Cub Reporter, doesn’t yet know how to read:

But out on the race course, the action was pretty intense. And if you happened to be sitting behind the wheel, it was even more so:

Indeed, the biggest problem the Bernal Dads encountered was… me. As the rookie driver on the team, my enthusiasm often overwhelmed both common sense and the laws of physics. Or, to paraphrase Top Gun, my accelerator foot had a bad habit of writing checks that the Molvo and the Whale couldn’t cash. As a result, I managed to accrue an astonishingly large amount of penalties in an impressively short amount of time. For this I will forever be contrite.

But on the bright side, even though I spun the Molvo once and put The Whale in the dirt twice (Doh!), I did not wreck either car, and returned both to the paddock more or less in the same condition as when I strapped in behind the wheel. Which I think counts as a victory, of a sort.

Oh, and along the way, I had a fantastic amount of fun.

When the checkered flag waved at the end of the weekend, these were the final results:

The Whale: 52nd place overall after completing 212 laps

The Molvo: 82nd place overall, after completing 176 laps

So we did not return home with glistening trophies or big piles of cash money. Yet the Bernal Dads managed always to look sexxxy and glamorous, and as we all know, in Bernal Heights, that’s really all that matters: